President Obama has asked Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to become his nominee for secretary of health and human services, tapping a red state ally to help him push through his plan to remake the nation's healthcare system. Sebelius accepted the president's offer and will be introduced by Obama at the White House today. The selection comes just days before Obama hosts a healthcare summit meeting at the White House.
The economic decline is continuing to ravage the nation's hospitals, with half of them operating in the red and many planning service and staffing cuts, two new reports show. These problems have been surfacing for several months, but new data show their breadth and depth. An unprecedented 50% of the nation's hospitals appear to be losing money, according to an analysis of government and proprietary data that Thomson Reuters is set to release.
President Obama's goal of remaking the healthcare system was always going to be difficult to reach, but the ailing economy has complicated his task. Obama is proposing a major expansion of the federal commitment to healthcare even though the government can barely afford the health insurance programs it has. The financial condition of Medicare is deteriorating because of the recession, and the Medicare trust fund could be depleted several years sooner than expected. But Obama hopes to turn the economic crisis to his advantage by citing the burden of health costs and the growing ranks of the uninsured, now at 46 million people, to justify a shake-up.
Virginia welcomed its first new hospital in more than 30 years when officials from MediCorp Health System opened Stafford Hospital Center. The $140 million, 100-bed hospital will serve Stafford and residents in southern Prince William County. The hospital offers inpatient and outpatient acute care. It has a full-service emergency department with 15 rooms, a family birthing center, a physical rehabilitation center, a pharmacy, a surgical wing, an intensive care unit, and a helipad.
Major changes to conflict-of-interest rules have been recommended by a task force of doctors and health professionals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to banning doctors from giving promotional talks for drug companies, the group said, doctors should be required to disclose specific amounts of money they receive from drug and medical device firms. The task force acknowledged that financial relationships with industry companies can undermine patient trust and threaten the integrity of the medical profession.
Rhode Island-based St. Joseph Health Services has announced that it is eliminating 36 positions and cutting pay for all of its non-union employees after losing about $3.4 million between October and December of last year. St. Joseph, which includes Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, in North Providence, and St. Joseph Hospital for Specialty Care, in Providence, has formally requested that all its union employees accept pay cuts, too. The pay cuts are 10% for senior management, 5% for middle management and 3% for all other employees.